What's New in Hardware

A quick look at some of the new products that Canon, Seagate and Westinghouse have to offer.

Canon Rounds Out Its All-in-One Inkjet LineupHome office workers and digital camera owners are used to multifunction printer/scanner/copiers with border-less photo printing, but Canon USA says they've never seen anything like its four new Pixma all-in-one machines.

The inkjet devices sport a slanted, low-profile design with rounded corners, as well as Canon's dual-color-gamut processing technology that independently controls brightness, hue and other elements to improve color accuracy when copying images and documents.

For $90, the Pixma MP160 offers resolution as high as 4,800 by 1,200 dpi with copying speeds up to 22 pages per minute for black and 17 ppm in color. A PictBridge port lets the four-color inkjet print photos without a PC. Stepping up to the Pixma MP180 ($100) brings direct photo printing in sizes up to 8.5-by11-inches, with 8-by-10-inch prints that require no trimming before framing.

The Pixma MP460's ($130) high-gloss acrylic finish masks a photo-lab-quality printer that can produce a border-less, dry-to-the-touch 4-by-6-inch print in under a minute, with a 1.9-inch color LCD to preview and select shots. Canon's Z-Lid scanner design lets you lift the lid roughly one inch above the glass for easy scanning of magazines or other three-dimensional items.

Finally, the $200 Pixma MP530 includes a fax with automatic document feeder plus double-sided printing, as well as individual ink tanks with both pigmented and dye-based black.

Combining its Full-photolithography Inkjet Nozzle Engineering (FINE) 1-picoliter-droplet print head with Canon's best photo papers yields prints designed to resist fading for up to 30 years under glass or 100 years in a photo album. All four all-in-ones will reach retail stores soon.

One Terabyte Network Storage for Small OfficesSeagate Technology has introduced Maxtor Shared Storage II, a small-office network centerpiece that combines 1TB capacity with automated data management and security for up to 20 PC or Mac users.

A software-setup wizard handles the job of giving users desktop-icon access to a shared public folder plus password-protected private folders, with a SimpleView console providing at-a-glance backup and storage status of all users. A Drag-and-Sort feature automatically identifies and sorts more than 100 different file types into document, Web, music, photo or movie folders.

In addition to daily automatic backup of user files, the device has two USB ports for sharing two printers or additional external drives. Its two 500GB hard disks can be configured for extra-secure RAID 1 mirroring of one drive to the other. The Maxtor Shared Storage II will ship later this month for $900.

Westinghouse Digital Debuts Deluxe 22-Inch LCDYou spend so much time at your desk working with your PC; why shouldn't you use the same display to kick back for a bit of gaming or HDTV viewing?

Westinghouse Digital has introduced a 22-inch widescreen flat-panel monitor that boasts not only VGA and DVI-D inputs but S-Video, composite, component and audio-in connectors to work with anything from a desktop or laptop PC to a satellite, cable, or HDTV receiver or camcorder.

The LCM-22W2 ($499) delivers 1,680 by 1,050 resolution with a 700:1 contrast ratio and 300 nits of brightness. A response time of five milliseconds makes the black-and silver-monitor a solid choice for 3D gaming, while 170-degree horizontal and 160-degree vertical viewing angles invite workgroup or family viewing.

The LCD automatically identifies the best display resolution when plugged into a PC and is compatible with VESA -standard wall mounts.

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